Sapphire X1950Pro Dual in the house

We had a chance to see this board in Las Vegas at the CES show. To be perfectly honest we didn't expect to see this card in production. We believed that Sapphire just wants to intimidate the market with it. Crossfire on a single board is an interesting though and many Taiwanese vendors showed prototypes, but Sapphire is the first to deliver.

Sapphire X1950Pro Dual graphic card is a dual GPU solution on single PCB. It features 2x X1950Pro GPU with 36 pixel pipelines shader processors per VPU. 512MB memory per core gives a total of 1GB DDR3 graphics memory. Using two of these Sapphire dual cards will give you 2GB memory, and who needs more!

The Sapphire X1950Pro Dual is a crossfire ready card, it has two RV570 chips onboard and each one can address 512 MB of memory. The card has total of 1024 MB memory. You need a Catalyst driver and if you want full performance you have to enable the CrossFire mode. This won't work on Nforce motherboards including the Nforce 680i, you need to try it on ATI or Intel chipsets.

The card has two X1950Pro GPUs each running at 581MHz, and 1GB memory clocked at 1404MHz. The card comes with two power connectors to ensure enough power for both cores.

Again, the card doesn't work on Nforce 680i motherboards, Crossfire doesn't work on Nvidia.

Luckily the card works on Intel's GD965OT and Crossfire works too.

Even the EVGA Geforce 8800GTX with mighty ACS3 cooler looks small in comparison with the Sapphire X1950Pro Dual graphics card.

Composite Figures 3Dmark 06

3DMark 06

Sapphire X1950PRO Dulal one GPU

5124

Sapphire X1950PRO Dulal Crossfire

8244

Leadtek 8800GTS 640MB

8477

SM2.0 Test

Score

GT1

GT2

Sapphire X1950PRO Dulal one GPU

1492

14.987

17.379

Sapphire X1950PRO Dulal Crossfire

3474

26.521

31.386

Leadtek 8800GTS 640MB

3758

30.587

32.040

HDR/SM3.0 Test

Score

HDR1

HDR2

Sapphire X1950PRO Dulal one GPU

2080

19.952

21.646

Sapphire X1950PRO Dulal Crossfire

3672

34.821

38.618

Leadtek 8800GTS 640MB

3641

32.878

39.934

CPU Test

Score

CPU1

CPU2

Sapphire X1950PRO Dulal one GPU

2299

0.723

1.173

Sapphire X1950PRO Dulal Crossfire

2295

0.724

1.164

Leadtek 8800GTS 640MB

2303

0.724

1.172

In 3DMark 06 on an Intel GD965OT board the card scored 8244 marks. Nvidia's 8800GTS is the direct performance and price rival and we see the Sapphire X1950Pro Dual card is doing the job very well.

If you turn the FSAA and Aniso on the Sapphire X1950 Dual card will beat Nvidia's 8800 GTS 640 MB card, but we will show you this in part two, where we will be testing more games including some latest hot titles. Stay tuned for more.